Tapestry’s House of Luxury Brands Bets Big on the Human Revolution

At only a year old, Tapestry has quickly amassed an established powerhouse of modern, luxury, lifestyle brands with Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman nestled within their growing portfolio. But the publicly traded, $6 billion Tapestry isn’t resting on its laurels. Instead, the company is investing in its 22,000 employees while ensuring leadership understands the power of the human revolution that has taken the business world by storm.

Tapestry is betting big on the human revolution — making HR a core part of its growth strategy — because its people are at the center of it all, according to Sarah Dunn, Chief Human Resources Officer for Tapestry, a featured guest at SAP’s recent SuccessConnect event in Las Vegas.

In the beginning…

Dunn said during Tapestry’s early inception, the company spent time to discover its identity, collaborating closely with CEO Victor Luis while starting a listening tour with its stores, brands and employees all around the world to better understand what the company should become.

Ultimately, Luis wanted Tapestry to be a place where employees love to work, that investors believe in and that future brands would want to be a part of. Dunn said this direction provided the company a foundation to work from which is heavy on customer experience inside and out.

“Our business happens in our stores and that’s why our customer experience is so important to us,” said Dunn. “How we create an employment experience that matches that customer experience is absolutely paramount to us.”

Building the foundation

As a result, Tapestry made an investment in SuccessFactors to help realize their HR transformation. And while some of the company’s brands have been SuccessFactors customers for 10 years, when Dunn and team started to think about the backbone for Tapestry they knew they needed to make additional enterprise investments.

In response, Dunn examined all core systems, put a team in place and created “People Hub” — eight modules of SuccessFactors implemented in 15 countries for about 18,000 employees, all within the last year.

“We purposely did this big bang approach in order to show every employee that we were serious, that we were investing in our future,” said Dunn. “We are putting the tools in place to make their lives and work experiences easier.”

Dunn said getting People Hub right, and ensuring every employee and manager is comfortable using it, is paramount to the success of the foundational work, which is ongoing.

“We’ve still got a few things to iron out — we’ve talked a lot this year about how there will be bumps along the way, and they are happy bumps,” said Dunn. “This year it’s about getting the HR trains to run on time.”

Getting those trains to run on time means creating seamless HR processes and easy to use systems with everything working as it should.

“With HR you need to get it right in order to play at higher levels and it is those higher-level, value-add things that I am most excited about,” said Dunn. “This human revolution is really going to add value to our culture. If we can have this frictionless work, then we can spend our time in the human revolution, creating the culture, creating and supporting the leaders and coaching every employee to be the best that they can be.”

Words of wisdom for those who haven’t taken the first steps toward a Human Revolution?

Dunn said don’t be afraid to be bold, but know that there will be challenges sometimes in getting the business case for this kind of transformation. It also helps to spend time with leadership teams and help them understand the impact of the human revolution.

“You have to be optimistic, resilient, realistic and have that vision for the future,” said Dunn.

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